While much of the nation is in nice arctic cool down this week, I thought I would throw out little something about our history and how Strike Finder™ got started with lightning triggers.
In March of 2010, my wife was 6 months pregnant with our fourth child and I had come up with a crazy ridiculous idea! I had always tried to take lightning pictures but the photographs were all over the place, they either were blown out, too dim, or, I simply missed the shot. I didn’t have the technique down for capturing elusive lightning photos.
So I set out on a journey to make a device that would ‘tell’ the camera to take the picture (keep in mind, my wife is 6 months pregnant with our fourth). I started making prototypes and spent countless evenings and weekends trying to build a device. Yep, I definitely won husband of the year that year! My wife was patient, and sometimes not so patient, in my pursuit of lightning photography. She hung in there while I turned our home office upside down and it into an electronics workbench! She was gracious enough to allow me to experiment with our Canon Rebel and attach all sorts of strange wires to it.
After a few attempts and some internet reading, I discovered how to trigger the camera with a closed circuit. Voila, that was all I needed. I knew at that point, I could make a light sensor that would react to changes in light. So I purchased an Arduino kit and coded a light sensor to detect changes in ambient light. Now all I needed was a lightning storm. I had tested the circuit thoroughly with flashlights, light bulbs, etc. and was getting some interesting shots but still had no lightning to prove that it would work in the field. At this point, I wasn’t even thinking of a business, I just wanted to get some cool lightning photographs.
April 22nd arrived and our daughter was born! Wow, was she a cute kid, luckily, she took after her mom! Everything in L&D went as planned and we were discharged the following night. That’s when things got real interesting and became pivotal for us.
First Strike
We were all pretty tired from the excitement that comes with ushering in a newborn. That night, on the way home with our family of 6, we heard on the radio that NOAA had issued a severe thunderstorm watch, and wow, that’s exactly what I was waiting for! I looked over at my wife and asked if I could storm chase, she obliged and said I was on my own (I was a little obsessed with testing my lightning trigger). We went home and put everyone to sleep (it was about 11:00pm).
As the night moved on, storms started to erupt in the Hill Country. Thunderstorms in our area typically move from NW to SE and I previously had scouted out a hill that provides a perfect view to the NW. So I set out with my camera in one hand, and a rats nest of wires in the other. Once I was set up on location, I quickly opened the back hatch of the SUV and waited for the storms to get closer. I put the camera on a small tripod and anxiously awaited for the lightning to come into view. I wired up the various alligator clips to the camera remote switch port and was ready to perform a “real live” test. It’s about 2:00am now and the storms really started to fire up, there was a nice squall line of thunderstorms approaching! As soon as the lightning bolts became clear, I turned on the prototype and it started firing the camera! I was getting great shots of lightning, they were perfect! Never before had I been able to get so many great shots of lightning at one time! I was thrilled, my hard work had finally paid off! (The photos below are the actual shots taken from that lightning storm with the prototype and Canon Rebel).
I’ll never forget that day, I had built something fast enough to catch lightning. I really don’t remember too much of the next few days since we were pretty sleep deprived with three little ones and a newborn. However, a couple of months later, I perfected the prototype and tested the waters to see if people would be interested in my ‘lightning trigger’.
Well, the rest is history. Once word got out that high speed camera triggers existed, it was time to start a business. The last four years has been an exciting journey, and sometimes not so exciting. Large bulk orders in the beginning were a challenge since we weren’t prepared to scale. Raising four young children, starting a business, oh, and working in corporate America, often made for some very late nights. But we persisted, my wife was patient, and in the end, it’s been worth it. We now run Ubertronix full time and have more time with our kids. I am truly blessed to have an amazing wife of almost 20 years and four amazing kids!
The First Photos
